“Well, the opposite of what you just said is the position we’re taking now,” Mike rapped out, still glaring at his screen. “So go write that up.”
“Yes, of course, excellent idea,” I said, dazed. “What a stroke of genius.” Mike waved me away. I remained in the doorway for a few seconds longer, waiting for that old bat Hillary Clinton to come streaking around a corner yelling, “Ha ha ha gotcha!” When that didn’t happen, I fled through the EPA HQ’s beige corridors (in the WJC building off Twelfth), which crawled with construction workers carrying in black snaky cables and puffy soundproofing material. I skittered by the Administrator’s guarded and locked suite (from which an ominous construction noise could be heard rattling away) and kept going until I reached the North Building’s fourth floor. From there, I made my way to my co-office.
“Oh my God,” Khaled Aziz wheezed as I entered.
Khaled occupied the desk tucked into the left southwest corner of the room. He sat hunched over and squinted at his IBM while ignoring a huge accordion file that he’d thrown onto the floor. I’d decorated my side of the space with a silver-framed photo of my parents and paper clips. I dropped into my mesh ergonomic chair while clutching the chlorpyrifos file to my chest.
“How is this our job now?” I asked.
“What, poisoning people?” Khaled said, gaping at a blindingly illustrated website titled “Household Toxins and Your Child.”
I crunched the file in my hands. “What’s so great about being rich if everyone is dead?”
“Fucking Comey,” Khaled gasped.
Khaled’s a thirty-eight-year-old expert in the Toxic Substances Control Act, 15 U.S.C. §2601 et seq. (1976), as well as a Yale PhD in American Studies. Back in 2009, after his boyfriend, Charles, died from a leukemia possibly contracted from benzene exposure, Khaled wrote his Am Stud dissertation on the queer ecology of Rachel Carson, which earned him zero job offers from the three universities with open positions in his field. He rallied by teaching poetry, composition, flute, history, soccer, and geography at Philips Andover, becoming addicted to Ambien, and then drying out at Harvard Law. He came here in ’14 from Beveridge & Diamond after weeping during a Superfund status conference. Khaled’s soft, lima-bean belly spreads out luxuriously from beneath his cashmere V-necks. He has grief and anxiety problems, thick silvery-black hair, and huge hazel eyes that seemed to be constantly widening in shock ever since the inauguration.
Khaled kicked a leg toward the file he’d thrown onto the ground. Papers spilled out of it. “I just got the house-paint case, with the low-income infants and the lead. And I’m not doing it.”
“I have chlorpyrifos,” I said.
“The PANNA petition?” Khaled shook his head. “What are you going to do?”
I raked my hands through my hair. “Slow-roll it?”
“There’s no slow-rolling that. He’s turned this place into a pit.”
“What’s he building in his office?” I hissed.
“They say it’s a soundproof phone booth,” Khaled said.
“A what?”
“That’s not the worst of it. I’ve heard this weird stuff about his housing and that he’s going to Morocco for a vacation-slash-working trip with energy consultants, I think?”
“This is a nightmare,” I jabbered. “We just have to wait it out until the impeachment, and then things will be more normal around here.”
“You don’t seem to understand that we lost.” Khaled slowly and gently lowered his head onto his desk. “What we have to do is quit.”
I flapped my file at him. “Somebody’s got to care about these farmworkers and indigent fetuses.”
Khaled muttered into his keyboard, “They’re not news, Marta.”
“Right,” I said.
I swiveled in my seat toward my computer. I was supposed to write an administrative order explaining that, despite objections from the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Pesticide Action Network North America, the EPA would continue to permit, that is, in legalese, “tolerate,” the agricultural use of a pesticidal neurotoxin. I did not do that, though. Instead, I logged onto Westlaw. I typed in the search, “pesticide! w/2 chlorpyrifos w/5 how awful is it really.”
Then I started to cry.
My parents were Graciela and Felipe Mendoza. They each stood around five feet tall and possessed the same white, square, strong teeth that I inherited, though they gritted theirs through the excitements of life with far more aplomb than I have ever been able to manage. My mother had beautiful hazel ox-eyes and liked to sing opera in an untrained voice. My father possessed a slightly built and superbly delicate bearing, which he accessorized with courtly gestures, like the tender way he would touch my mother on her lower back as he’d guide her protectively on her way to the hairdresser’s.
Professionally, both of my parents could claim an expertise in table- and wine-grape harvest and management, forged after decades of episodic employment in the lucrative California vineyards. Their métier was pest control. The government had already helpfully approved the use of organophosphates in the grape war against the destructive mealybug in ’65, and so they would venture out among the vines, applying the spray during the dormant season, that is, the vulnerable period just before bud break. I accompanied them in their labors during my early years. When I was an infant, they would bring me into the fields tied to one of their chests in a cotton sling. Later on, I used our backpack sprayer myself.
I was only exposed directly until the age of sixteen. In junior high and the first two years of high school, I spent every summer and many after-class hours making a 0.5 percent spray by pouring in two and two-thirds fluid ounces Chlorpyrifos EZ to each gallon of water. With my parents doing likewise, I’d stand in the tangy barn of whatever winery we were working for and busily mix the solution into big, white plastic buckets while wearing a cotton mask. The pesticide splashed about when I’d agitate the containers. It inevitably covered my arms and sometimes my face and thighs. I’d then pour the solution into the black plastic body of the sprayer and screw on the lid. Afterward, I dashed about the vineyards, feeling the sun warm my forehead and listening to the few remaining birds cheeping and tweeting. I remember that I was happy. The chlorpyrifos would gush out of my pump and rainbow the vines while interfering with mealybug neural systems and brain function. I was good at my work. I used a coarse droplet nozzle, which is a good choice for insecticides because it allows for deeper penetration into ground soil. It seems that this choice of technology also proved excellent for saturating the entirety of the human respiratory system.
When I reached eleventh grade, my parents wanted me to stop spraying because I developed a nasty cough, which the Valley Urgent Care nurses treated with Robitussin Extra Strength Cough Syrup that I didn’t take upon escaping from the clinic because it made me sleep all day. Instead of working in agriculture, Mom and Dad suggested, I should rest and focus on my studies. And so I quit the fields and matriculated eventually to California State, Bakersfield.
I loved school. This was in 1989. In my freshman year at CSB, I would clench over my books in the library, flipping pages, writing wordy poems, and discreetly divesting myself of unmentionables into handkerchiefs. I submitted lengthy papers to my exhausted TAs, who would look at me dead-eyed over their spectacles and nod at my flaming love for learning with mournful recognition. I thought I might be a writer. I plotted out an excitement-packed future where I’d compose novels laced with lacerating leftist subtext inspired by George Orwell and Herman Melville. I would Jean-Paul Sartreishly work for radical newspapers, reporting on atrocities in exciting far-flung nations. I’d pen poems and stories that would change the world, like Langston Hughes and James Baldwin.
But, in fact, I would not do any of that. Because I coughed, I continued coughing. I coughed some more. I could not stop coughing.
In the middle of my first semester of my second year, my parents whisked me out of class and took me to a proper doctor. From there, I was made hackingly
to endure a battery of x-rays, blood tests, and other Frankensteinian ordeals. The proper doctor, I recall, began to sob when trying to explain certain difficult facts. But my memory grows fuzzy after this point. I found myself splayed in a gurney at Bakersfield Mercy Hospital’s pulmonary ward. Lung cancer. But I didn’t smoke. “Could it be the pesticide?” my father asked, his right arm trembling. The goop that I bathed in every summer since the age of zero? The proper doctor was now gone and had been replaced by a team of harried oncologists. These experts looked at my parents and me with the same enervated expression as my CSB TAs. They checked their files and admitted that they could not determine the answer to my father’s question either way. The studies—the tests—the etiology—the causation—they nodded at us sagely, explaining that all of the hypotheses and conclusions concerning pesticide toxicity remained complicated and confusing, and no, they couldn’t say.
And my prognosis? Good, they said. Bad, they said. You’re dead, others said. You’ll live, one said.
Meanwhile, my parents began to wither away. One moment they were there, wiping my face with cool towelettes and making incredible grieving sounds, and the next minute, they seemed to simply vanish from the hospital’s bleach-scented halls. It seemed that during my medical sojourn my mom and dad had experienced some unpleasant symptoms, gotten checkups, and received bad news from the family neurologist.
Within two years they were dead.
It turned out that enduring mind-blasting grief is not in my wheelhouse. Losing my parents in this way was so painful that I thought it was more likely to stop my heart than the bronchogenic carcinoma was. That’s why, for a long time, I worked hard to bury the hardest memories from this chapter of my life by cultivating my interests and following my passions and forgiving myself. In so doing, I exhibited the same kind of dimwittery as people who say that you should live in the present or think that you can safely dispose of nuclear waste and recyclable plastics.
Still, after running gently amok for a few years, I will say that the details did begin to blur a bit. I grew super busy, beating cancer and finishing college in the early aughts. I thereafter applied to law school with a vague idea of making the world a less unbelievably ghastly place. Meanwhile, the dominoes that began tipping at my birth continued clicking and crashing until I found myself lawyering at the EPA and stumbled onto my current career as an enforcer for the Dow Chemical Company.
At the EPA, we housed activist environmental widowers, like Khaled, who obsessively attacked every toxin as if it were a mass murderer and seemed to believe that bullet-point memos contained actual ammunition. But after an initially energetic phase waging war on any and all environmental mutagens in the loving memory of my parents, I abandoned that path because it just made me so . . . exhausted. After nine years at the Agency, I’d satisfied myself with being a good team player who worked on changing the system through maybe slow-moving but still positive gains. My modest but well-regarded output included writing a third of the first version of the Clean Power Plan (leashing the carbon output of power plants) and editing the sixth draft of Obama’s new standards on methane emissions (which would shrink CH4 output to 33M tons of carbon pollution a year). The rest of the time I pursued what some people called a balanced life but what I now understand is a form of socially sanctioned amnesia, which I cultivated by reading, dabbling in pottery, maybe drinking just a little, occasionally dating—the basics.
But my perfect and stupid life was soon to be upended in February ’17, when the Administrator and Mike showed up and started breaking shit within the first hour. “Breaking shit” is administrative law patois for neoconservative Earth-wide destruction via regulatory rollback. As of late March of that year, about half of our lifers had already contracted a psychic virus that left them resting their hands lifelessly on their computer keyboards while their polar-bear posters slowly peeled off the walls. We’d learned in the first exciting phase of the Administrator’s arrival that he wouldn’t let us take written notes in meetings and had also asked for a bulletproof desk because he feared that Code Pinkers would break down his door to assail him with Venezuelan guns donated by George Soros. In my nightmares at the time, the bullets ricocheted off the bulletproof desk and splattered my IBM with my own personal brains, which I actually deserved. During the past weeks Mike had shoutingly optimized workplace productivity so that I had already helped the Administrator sign off on Enbridge’s expansion of the Alberta Clipper Pipeline. I’d also obeyed directives to scrub the words “climate change” from EPA webpages directing state, local, and tribal governments to alternative energy resources.
And now Mike had tasked me with writing the order denying the petition to revoke the EPA’s chlorpyrifos permission. The Natural Resources Defense Council and the Pesticide Action Network North America had petitioned us back in ’07 to revoke the tolerance that the EPA had issued in the ’60s for the pesticide’s use on food and feed crops, such as apples, cherries, nectarines, bananas, strawberries, and—yes—grapes. In 2015 and also 2016, the EPA had proposed pulling the allowance based on a reported possibly heightened neurological risk in recently exposed children and exacerbated hazards for farmworkers who mix, load, and apply chlorpyrifos pesticide products. The EPA then subjected the tolerance revocation to the necessary “notice and comment” period. This is the administrative interlude when the public may and does copiously comment on proposed rules and the Agency responds. Except for certain furious addendums offered by stalwart advocates of the chemical industry, the commentary looked supportive of the change in policy, and, bolstered by a court order, during the last golden days of the Obama administration, we idiotically set it for a final decision on March 31, 2017.
After this, a short and explosive chain of calamities ensued, and Mike had called me up to his office with the instructions to reverse our position. I was now saddled with the mission of ensuring that farmworkers could still spread the pesticide as if it were the Good News and chemical company COOs could keep sleeping in hyperbaric chambers made of gold bullion.
Five days later, I sat at my office desk, which remained cluttered with my computer, the silver-framed photo of my parents, and the bulging, brown chlorpyrifos folder. Khaled grumbled next to me as he plucked out papers from his massive lead-paint file and tore them into neat little strips and threw them in the air like streamers.
“Don’t do it,” he said.
“If we get fired, then we lose any influence.” I looked at my blank screen. “I still have a chance to work from the inside, here. I still have a shot at fighting this.”
“What you have is Stockholm syndrome.”
“When are you leaving the Agency?”
“I talked to Charles’s mother yesterday and told her the week after next.” Charles, again, was Khaled’s lover who had died after benzene exposure and the maybe resulting leukemia.
My hands loitered on my keyboard. I waited for something to save me. I looked at my parents’ shiny smiling faces. I looked at the file.
I began to type.
In this Order, EPA denies a petition requesting that EPA revoke all tolerances for the pesticide chlorpyrifos under section 408(d) of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. . . . EPA has concluded that, despite several years of study, the science addressing neurodevelopmental effects remains unresolved and that further evaluation of the science during the remaining time for completion of registration review is warranted to achieve greater certainty as to whether the potential exists for adverse neurodevelopmental effects to occur from current human exposures to chlorpyrifos.
“Did you get my pens?” I overheard the Administrator ask Mike and Clarissa Bender, our new third in command, a week after I wrote the order denying the chlorpyrifos petition. The entirety of the Office of General Counsel’s legal staff was assembling in the maple-paneled Polaris conference room, on the Concourse level in the Ronald Reagan Building. Housekeeping had prepared the space with multiple rows of burgundy-upholstered chairs, enough to hold the
230 lawyers who worked for the Agency at the time.
A wooden lectern presided at the front of the room. Behind it stood the Administrator, sweating lightly. He’s about five foot eight and has a big balding head frosted with steel-gray fluff. He wore a soft blue suit of a beautiful cut and a red tie with little white polka dots. The buzz-haired Security Chief flanked him, along with twenty or so gun-bulging special agents, some wearing blue jackets and others police clothes and sheriffy badges. One of the Administrator’s assistants, a champagne-haired youngster called Tracey, hovered at his far right side, jangling her earrings and clutching a phone. To the Administrator’s direct left sat a panel table. This hosted our newly manufactured subclass supervisor, Clarissa, a pretty redhead who wore a blue bodycon frock that seemed to be an exact replica of Ivanka Trump’s style. Mike sat next to her, wearing gray and reading a file of notes with insane-looking concentration. I had a good view of the circus as Khaled and I had arrived late and the only remaining seats were in the front row.
Mike and Clarissa looked up at the Administrator, confused.
“The pens?” Clarissa asked.
“Do you need a pen?” Mike asked.
“I thought we weren’t supposed to bring pens, sir,” Clarissa said.
Tracey with the earrings darted forward. “I have twelve silver fountains customized with your signature and the Agency seal.”
“All right,” the Administrator said.
“Do you want more?” Tracey asked.
“Umgh.” The Administrator began frantically searching his pockets for his phone. When he discovered that it was strapped to his belt, he said, “Let’s get started.”
Next to me, Khaled bent forward and held his head in his hands.
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